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5066RE: FW: [scrumdevelopment] Frequent Releases

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Shimmings, Ian

Oct 31, 2004

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> These absolute rules always frustrate me because it does depend.

Of course it does. Hence the words "as soon as it is possible". The definition I would apply is "release when the business value (usually measured as ROI) makes the cost of deployment acceptable". As you go on to illustrate, this can vary widely.

To be my usual tiresome self i would like to interject a little "it
depends" here.

Define an ideal and come up with a rubric for pattern variation.

These absolute rules always frustrate me because it does depend.

The ideal is release as often and soon as possible.

What that means in each context is something different.

For example, in one of my favorite projects i was working on a large
internal web site that had over 100 simultaneous active heavy users. It used
perl and CGI so i made live changes continually. There was never
a real release of anything. This worked 99% of the time and it
was exciting.

Training was an issue and i tried not to break features, but that's
not always possible or even desirable. You can't make stuff
better if you can't break it.

On another project each release cost millions of dollars because an
entire nationwide network had to be upgraded and we could cut all
data traffic in large regions of north America. This customer treated
each release like a nuclear attack so releases were infrequent to
say the least. Yet other customers in a similar situation
didn't care and wanted releases much faster.

On another project the software was more your traditional enterprise
software that was installed using installshield or whatever. Typically
everyone was always very busy so releases were more of
an annoyance to them.

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